I agree with the general sentiment here.
Neverwinter Nights was a toolset with a demo adventure attached. This is the OC, and it's rather bad. But some of the stuff people made with it ended up being brilliant.
Fun factoid: NWN was never actually -meant- to have a long, meaty single-player campaign. From gamasutra:
Our original plan for the NWN story called for approximately 30 2-hour missions that people could play together, enjoy a wonderful experience, and exit from the game. However, market research led us to believe that a vast single-player story was important to end-users; they did not want to see Mechwarrior-style missions where the party would be briefed, charge off like raging lunatics, slay and loot the villains, and then return to the tavern for a nice cup of mead.
This led to a -lot- of juryrigging in the OC. All that stuff where people keep giving you tokens? It's because the game otherwise can't remember stuff you did across modules. And there were plenty of performance issues too. Not to mention the fun bugs caused by suddenly having huge modules do stuff they weren't originally conceived to do:
I'm also convinced that this explains the OC's tons of boring filler combat and utterly pointless fetch quests and the never-ending spam of lootable chests and barrels holding 1 GP or 3 crossbow bolts. Filler to make the game look and feel like a "bioware" sized game, which the designers threw together at the last minute because market research was promising doom and gloom if they didn't. That's harder to find quotes on, though.
But speaking of fun bugs:
This led to one of our favorite bugs concerning the reputation system: the disappearing orcs. The orcs were placed in the Aurora Toolset, the module designer then starts the chapter, and plays through the chapter, testing for balance. By the time the designer reaches the area containing the orcs, there is only treasure lying on the ground; the orcs are long gone. The AI was accused of forcing the creatures to drop their treasure and run away. Upon further investigation, the orcs had been told to "wander" near the area that they were standing in. Nearby, there was a large encounter area that spawned deer. However, orcs are hostile to deer. So, the orc would "wander" into the area, and a deer would appear. The orc then proceeds to make short work of the deer. All is fine in the world, but the deer don't like orcs any more. The encounter area resets, and says "there's a hostile creature nearby", and the deer runs headlong at the orc. The orc says "Fine! Deer Stew #2 coming up!". Repeat ad nauseum. Unfortunately, the orc doesn't have an unlimited capacity to heal himself. After about 25 deer are spawned in, they finally get enough lucky attacks on the orc to kill the orc outright. To tie things off, the encounter area would reacquire and destroy the deer, since keeping extra encounter creatures that weren't actively fighting or watched by a PC was just a waste of CPU time. Hence, the orc's treasure would be left on the ground, and no sign of the victorious deer was to be found!
Fortunately, lots of the really quirky behaviour was patched or improved on by the expansions, so modern NWN is a much better experience than it was on release, and builders don't have to use nearly so many dirty tricks.
Read the whole article here if you want:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2890/neverwinter_nights_clientserver_.php?print=1
